vCloud Director: Networking Overview | Green House Data

Setting up networking is the step that we receive the most questions about when customers are new to the vCloud environment.  We’re currently working on a video tutorial that will further help clients with the steps of setting up networking.  In the meantime, here is an overview of the types of networking available and the tabs that you’ll find when you are configuring your network.

3 Types of Networking:

• Routed: This connection provides an address on a local subnet that routes out through a firewall to reach the Internet.
• Internal: This connection provides local network access only and is not externally routable. One example of using this network type would be when you have a database server that needs to communicate with a webserver on the same network, but not route out to the Internet.
• Direct: Places a public IP address on your server and provides a direct connection to the Internet without a firewall.

Network Configuration Tabs: When you right click on your network, you’ll see an option to “Configure Services”. This will open up a pop up for the following tab settings:

• DHCP: Enables DHCP to dynamically assign local addresses to machines in your vCloud environment.
• Firewall:  In this tab, you will add rules to your firewall to allow or deny specific network traffic. By default the firewall is enabled with all outgoing traffic allowed; however, you will need to create rules to allow incoming traffic.
• NAT – External IPs: In this section, customers can add additional external IPs to their organization.
• NAT Mapping: In this section, customers can configure network address translation (NAT) rules to map internal addresses to external routable addresses.
• Site-to-Site VPN: Offers the ability to set up a secure VPN tunnel between clouds.
• Static Routing: This tab allows you to create static routes to manually control the path your traffic takes within and out of the network.

Stay tuned for our video tutorial on setting up networking! If you have questions in the meantime, feel free to contact us, we’re happy to help.